Adapting to hybrid

A Harvard Business Review article ‘How to manage a hybrid team’ reports on what we’re seeing and experiencing: “your team members are likely contending with vastly different situations.”

Beyond just their locations of work, many are adapting to changing situations at home or the office and the more permanent distribution of team members across locations. 

This is the hybrid workforce. HBR suggests we ask: 

➡️ “What is the experience my employees are having at work, and how can I empower them to do the best they can?”

▶️ “What protocols can you put in place to ensure that the employees in the office are in sync with those working from home?”

Given people in your team might be located in different places but still need to be brought together - in meetings and workshops - how will you build empowerment and keep things in sync? 

Tips include : 
- beware of an ‘us vs them’ situation 
- be clear, inclusive and flexible
- know it’s not easy and will take some adjustment for all parties. 

For those who are new to this, be open to learning and experimenting, knowing that perfection isn’t possible, but progress certainly is. 

“We want this session to be interactive”

Yes. We do too! 

There’s only so much listening or just watching of slides we can handle. Meeting after meeting or an all-talk workshop can become a bit much ... after a full day of it, a week of it or six months of it!!

So, plan ahead for interaction. 

🌟Ask a question and for the response to be in the chat box or to share an emoji

🌟Ask a question via a poll and see the results 

🌟Share a story and ask for stories

🌟Use the Spotlight feature (in Zoom) to feature a few people at a time in panel style, group share or a fishbowl conversation 

🌟Hear several people’s stories and weave them together, finding common themes or threads 


If you’d like the session to be interactive, you can be sure the team, guests and participants will probably want it to be interactive too. 

🌟Allow the time. 
🌟Vary the activities. 
🌟Encourage ... and then let the interaction happen. 

Loosen the grip on controlling all of the information. There’s some magic waiting there to be made. 

A discovery mindset : do you have it

One of the best meetings and workshops to design and lead is a discovery workshop. 

To simply and profoundly ‘find out’. 

Get people together - online is fine - and find out what they:
think
know
believe
hope
envisage
are prepared to do. 

There is much to discover and relearn about people, situations, problems and challenges. Things are changing. There may be new things to discover. 

What a shame it is to think we already know all there is to know, or to think we already have the best solutions. 

It’s one of my favourite and most impactful workshops to design and facilitate, because it so often delivers things we didn’t know!  

Because ... discovery! 

Who could you bring together to discover what the heck is going on, what they think, and what is possible? 

Call it a Discovery Workshop and get it going. 

Design for relevance

When we bring people together to collaborate, co-design and solve problems, we must consider how to help them do their best work.

We’re so bad at meetings - and boring ones - that our bad meeting culture gets transferred and stretched into longer sessions like workshops. 

We don’t just have boring meetings for an hour; we end up having boring workshops for 3-hours! 

So many of the leaders I train in better facilitation skills want to know about fun games for their workshops. They soon realize the best activities are those that actually help us do the work we are there to do. 

Careful you don’t waste time, energy and participant engagement on games that might be high on fun, but end up being low on relevance and results. 

It is possible to design agendas and activities for workshops that are interesting, engaging, creative ... and help get the work done too!

Don’t be distracted by the pursuit of cute; you could completely miss out on designing for relevance and results. 

How you’re missing out on the gold

It’s another online meeting ... the meeting leader or facilitator announces they’re about to put us into breakout rooms to chat.

We get to connect with others, to have a smaller, more intimate conversation and to dive in to a topic or share ideas.

But too often the insights from breakout rooms and group activities aren’t noted or are lost, and not reincorporated into the meeting.

At other times, we can summarise or distill contributions too far.

Recently, 20 mins in breakout rooms was distilled down to one word. That’s taking a summary too far! The meaning gets lost, the effort wasted and the benefits and learnings are ... gone.

If you’re inviting people to have a conversation, be sure to think about how you’ll handle and leverage those ideas and contributions.

Sure ... you don’t have to hear from everyone.

But don’t hear back from no one!

How will you utilize the gold that’s been generated?

Because that’s what it is.

Absolute GOLD! ⭐️

We don’t have all the answers. The group often does.

Listen to them.